Thursday, January 17, 2008

A Modest Proposal for Mr. McCullough

It's time for our Asshat Of The Week.

Kevin McCullough, a columnist for "Townhall" (where facts are no excuse for the truth), wrote a column about Mass Effect earlier this week.

Not surprisingly, he had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. Here are a few excerpts (thanks Game Politics):It’s called “Mass Effect” and it allows its players… to engage in the most realistic sex acts ever conceived. One can custom design the shape, form, bodies, race, hair style, breast size of the images they wish to “engage” and then watch in crystal clear, LCD, 54 inch screen, HD clarity as the video game “persons” hump in every form, format, multiple, gender-oriented possibility they can think of…

…And because of the digital chip age in which we live - “Mass Effect” can be customized to sodomize whatever, whoever, however, the game player wishes.

Wow. That's a spectacular amount of misinformation. How could this idiot not know that every game has a sodomy scene? Who among us can forget the sodomy scene in Pac-Man? Or King's Quest?

I don't know about you, but when I saw that sqiggly-shaped green piece force the red block to "submit" in Tetris, it changed me forever. Something in me died that day.

Is it asking too much that one of these clowns actually do research before they just start making things up? If he had, maybe he would have realized that anything you can see in Mass Effect doesn't even rival what you can see on the major networks almost every night?

Here's what I really regret about all this. I desperately wish the the designers had given the aliens multiple sex organs. I mean--they're aliens, right? So why not?

If they had, then we could have listened to McCullough saying something like this:…And because of the digital chip age in which we live - “Mass Effect” can be customized to sodomize alien beings with multiple vaginas and other sexual orifices. And because of this, our children will soon be walking the streets, looking to "hook up" with aliens.

Oh, I only wish.

Here's one more salvo from McCullough:If a pre-teen, teen, young adult, or adult male plays such a game in which the women DO submit without choice, are made to appear as Barbie streetwalkers, and perform whatever act can be imagined, what’s to stop that same male from assuming that the women in his “other world” shouldn’t be forced to do the same.

I'd say "parents" and "common sense," but it's not an unreasonable question. Here's one for you, though, Mr. McCullough: if a pre-teen, teen, young adult, or adult male reads a column where the asshole who wrote it makes outrageous accusations but did absolutely no fact-checking to verify his claims, and this asshole gets a huge amount of publicity, what's to stop that same male from assuming that he should do the same?

Here's a crazy thought, Kevin (you don't mind if I call you Kevin, do you? My only other choice was "dickhead"): maybe you should actually do "research" before you write a column. Maybe you could actually try to see what you're going to write about before you actually write about it. Having at least a bare acquaintance with the facts would be a big improvement.